Abstract
The Medicines Use Review is a community pharmacy service funded in the United Kingdom to improve patients’ adherence to medication and reduce medicines waste. The objective was to develop, pilot, and utilize a new Medicines Use Review patient satisfaction questionnaire. A questionnaire for patient self-completion was developed using a published framework of patient satisfaction with the Medicines Use Review service. The questions were validated using the content validity index and the questionnaire piloted through three pharmacies (February–April 2016). The revised questionnaire contained 12 questions with responses on a 5-point Likert scale, and a comments box. The questionnaire was distributed to patients following a Medicines Use Review consultation via community pharmacies (June–October 2016). Exploratory factor analysis and Cronbach’s α were performed to investigate the relationships between the items and to examine structural validity. The survey results were examined for patients’ reported satisfaction with Medicines Use Reviews, while the handwritten comments were thematically analyzed and mapped against the questionnaire items. An estimated 2,151 questionnaires were handed out, and a total of 505 responses were received indicating a 24% response rate. Exploratory factor analysis revealed two factors with a cumulative variance of 68.8%, and Cronbach’s α showed high internal consistency for each factor (α=0.90 and α=0.89, respectively). The survey results demonstrated that patients could show a high degree of overall satisfaction with the service, even if initially reluctant to take part in a Medicines Use Review. The results support the Medicines Use Review patient satisfaction questionnaire as a suitable tool for measuring patient satisfaction with the Medicines Use Review service. A wider study is needed to confirm the findings about this community pharmacy-based adherence service.
Supplementary materials
Table S1 The correlation between MUR-PSQ-v2 items
Table S2 Total variance and factors extracted
Table S3 Respondents’ scores on the MUR-PSQ-v2
Acknowledgments
The authors would like to acknowledge and thank the pharmacies, pharmacists, and patients who participated in the study. Without their contributions, the study could not have been successful. We also thank the East of England Respiratory Strategic Clinical Network for helping with the dissemination of questionnaires during the content validation phase and Day Lewis Pharmacy Group for helping to disseminate the questionnaires during the formal data collection period.
Disclosure
Dr Caroline Parkhurst is employed by the Day Lewis Pharmacy Group. The authors report no other conflicts of interest in this work.